Source | BohuFN

In the fierce race to integrate DeepSeek, ByteDance held its ground until the very end.

According to TechPlanet, Douyin recently tested integrating Doubao into its platform, featuring two primary entry points: one alongside functions like liking, commenting, and sharing, and the other within the Douyin App's message list.

Unlike its peers rushing to embrace DeepSeek, ByteDance has exercised restraint in integrating it into its products.

Tencent, for instance, is swiftly integrating DeepSeek into its applications like the general AI app Yuanbao and WeChat to capitalize on the surge in traffic. Simultaneously, it is introducing its own reasoning model, Hunyuan T1, at a rapid pace. Recently, "Tencent Yuanbao" topped the free App download charts on the Chinese Apple App Store.

In contrast, ByteDance has yet to officially announce the integration of DeepSeek into its core products. In the consumer sector, only the Wukong browser and the rumored AI video generation tool Ji Meng have been integrated. This latest integration of Doubao into Douyin further underscores ByteDance's ambitions in AI.

Over the past year, ByteDance has emerged as one of China's most aggressive investors in AI, transitioning from a late entrant to achieving remarkable results through substantial efforts. Last year, Doubao invested over 1 billion yuan in acquiring C-end users, making it China's largest AI app by user base at the time. In terms of funding, ByteDance has heavily invested in AI, with capital expenditures reaching 80 billion yuan in 2024 alone, nearly matching the combined total of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (about 100 billion yuan).

Regarding DeepSeek's emergence, ByteDance is evidently not content. According to Huxiu reports, within ByteDance, it is believed that short-term fluctuations do not reflect the true user experience of a product.

The essence of competition in AI applications is a battle for attention. As two major beneficiaries of mobile internet traffic entry points, Tencent and ByteDance are well aware of its importance, but ByteDance may harbor even grander ambitions.

01 AI Application Factory

In response to DeepSeek's impact, Tencent has adopted a dual-model strategy.

On one hand, Tencent has chosen to open up a multitude of C-end products, including Yuanbao, WeChat, Tencent Docs, Licaitong, WeChat Work, QQ Music, QQ Browser, and even its flagship game product Game for Peace, which has also officially announced its integration.

On the other hand, Tencent is intensively updating its reasoning models, Hunyuan T1 and Turbo S, with the former focusing on deep thinking and the latter emphasizing "instant replies".

Tencent's decision to open up its products is not merely to promote DeepSeek. In fact, leveraging DeepSeek's massive influence, and with DeepSeek temporarily unable to serve this segment of users, Tencent's C-end products have absorbed a significant number of users. The most notable example is the general AI app Yuanbao, whose current download volume has skyrocketed to the top of the charts, with Everbright Securities predicting that Tencent Yuanbao's user base will exceed 50 million by 2025.

Unlike Tencent, ByteDance has not integrated DeepSeek into many C-end products, particularly its core product Douyin.

ByteDance continues to allocate its core resources to its own Doubao.

According to TechPlanet, on the Douyin short video interface, Doubao appears alongside core functions like avatars, likes, comments, and shares. Additionally, ByteDance's efforts to direct traffic to Doubao are more pronounced in the message bar. When opening the home page message bar, Doubao automatically appears, offering three options: asking and answering questions, image generation, and downloading Doubao.

For Doubao, such prominent traffic entry points are undoubtedly conducive to more users experiencing its AI capabilities. The first two options are clearly designed to entice users to create more content using Doubao by showcasing its capabilities, while the last option directly converts Douyin's traffic into Doubao's.

However, judging from the manner in which Doubao is integrated, ByteDance's approach to AI applications still centers on how to better meet user needs. For instance, Doubao's strengths lie in text generation and refinement, information extraction, etc., which are extremely beneficial to Douyin creators. Simultaneously, Doubao also aids in addressing the immediate needs of Douyin users to search for answers. Overall, the integration of Doubao into Douyin enhances the user experience on Douyin, thereby increasing user engagement time.

Creating AI applications based on user needs and conducting saturation attacks is ByteDance's primary approach.

For example, currently, almost all programmers utilize AI programming products like Copilot and Cursor. ByteDance's recently launched AI programming product Trae in China boasts two main features: it is free and offers unlimited access to Claude 3.5 services, and it optimizes support for the mini-program development environment.

It's not just Trae. ByteDance is also preparing to launch other AI applications, including the consulting tool "Mofang Zhidao" and the medical service-focused "Xiaohe AI Doctor".

For ByteDance, they possess a wealth of businesses to implement AI scenarios, which is an advantage they will not relinquish.

02 AI is a Marathon

ByteDance's expectations for AI are undoubtedly immense. Disregarding DeepSeek's emergence, Doubao was actually the product that made the most progress throughout last year.

However, AI applications are more akin to a marathon. On one hand, the development and evolution of AGI are rapid. Initially, the industry recognized computing power as the key to competition, but now the quality of training data is becoming increasingly crucial. On the other hand, current AI applications are still in their nascent stages, evidenced by the generally low retention rates of large model products on the market. The vast majority of users may abandon them after trying them out. Statistics show that the 30-day user retention rate of AI applications like Doubao, Kimi, Wenxiaoyan, and Yuanbao is less than 1%.

In fact, there is still room for further exploration even in the form of AI applications themselves. Just yesterday, a general AI product named Manus stunned the industry. In the GAIA (General AI Assistants) benchmark evaluation system for general AI assistant capabilities, Manus scored higher than OpenAI's DeepResearch, ranking first.

According to the sharing of the digital life character Kazek, Manus can break down tasks, plan, and execute extremely complex tasks based on your questions and requirements, such as organizing a dozen invoices into a table or analyzing Alibaba's stock based on various indicators. Its level of completion and efficiency surpasses that of real humans. Consequently, Manus's performance has amazed some industry insiders, who have dubbed it the "Deepseek moment" of "AI Agent".

This also validates ByteDance's AI strategy to a certain extent: models are models, and products are products.

At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, ByteDance made a series of organizational adjustments for AI. These adjustments primarily focused on two aspects: one is for cutting-edge AI research, with the establishment of a research project codenamed "Seed Edge", aimed at long-term exploration of the next generation of reasoning, perception, model design, paradigms, and scaling, without the pursuit of quick results.

The other is the adjustment of the Flow department responsible for AI to the same level as Huoshan, relying on the Doubao team and basic engineering technology. The former is responsible for empowering C-end users with AI capabilities, while the latter primarily enables enterprises and developers to utilize AI.

ByteDance's past experience has been to conquer the market with the rationality of AB testing tools. Now that they are revisiting romanticism, it is more like an expression of: I want it all.

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